AN EFFICIENT FAST HEVC ENCODING TECHNIQUE

HEVC video coding standard uses a structure of flexible Coding Unit (CU) quad tree. This flexibility increases the coding efficiency and allows the standard to achieve better rate-distortion performance compared to its prior H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. The improvement of coding efficiency came at the cost of high encoding complexity. This paper presents a fast algorithm to reduce the encoding complexity by an early termination decision with reference frame selection. Experimental results for seven standard video sequences show that the proposed algorithm can save up to 53.79% of the encoding time compared to the original HM14. Different video sequences with different frame rates, quantization parameters and resolutions were used in the experiments. The paper also presented the effect of changing resolutions, frame rates and bit rates on compression efficiency for both HM and the proposed algorithm. In comparison with the original software, the proposed algorithm presents significant improvement and time saving. In addition, the proposed algorithm outperformed two of the best state of the art proposed methods.